When a British male last won the Australian Open title, 76 years ago, he wore long trousers and streaks of white from his painted wooden racket transferred to his face making him look "like a Red Indian on the warpath". The Manchester Guardian wrote a leader suggesting that Fred Perry's success "should do much to explode the popular fallacy that England has degenerated athletically".

The past maybe a foreign country where they do things differently but British tennis fans – and many for whom the sport normally means diddly-squat – will hope this morning that Andy Murray can repeat what Perry achieved in the 1934 final at Rushcutters Bay in Sydney. If he does upset the rampant Roger Federer, though, it is highly unlikely to be as comfortably as Perry disposed of the Australian Jack Crawford, who won only nine games in the title match.

Perry set sail for Australia from America in the autumn of 1933, having won the US title at Forest Hills, New York, in September to secure the first of his eight grand slam titles. Few sportsmen have embraced foreign travel quite as enthusiastically as Perry and his first trans-Pacific passage, with stop-offs at Tahiti and the Cook Islands, made a lasting impression. "I do not mind how often I repeat that glorious voyage across the Pacific," he wrote.

By now Perry, 25, the precocious, working-class boy from Stockport who so spectacularly gate-crashed the predominantly genteel world of tennis, was the outstanding amateur player in the world. He was supremely fit, having trained hard with the successful Arsenal sides of that time in defiance of tennis's dim view of extra-curricular physical exercise; he also had a supremely competitive game whose defining stroke was a devastating, whipped forehand taken soon after the ball bounced.

Perry received an early warning on his first visit to Australia about howthe locals expected people to behave. When he and his doubles partner, Pat Hughes, wore white dinner jackets that they had had made in the United States to a reception in Melbourne they were panned by the press. Ostentation went down as well then with the Aussies as it does now.

At another function the mayor of Sydney referred to the recent bodyline Test cricket series, which had caused a diplomatic crisis between Britain and Australia when the England fast bowler Harold Larwood, following orders, targeted batsmen rather than the stumps. The mayor asked Hughes, who was captain of the British contingent, whether he too had arrived with a secret weapon. Hughes said he had: Fred Perry.

They were prophetic words. Perry's only meaningful challenge in the Australian championships came in his semi-final against Vivian McGrath, who was described by one local sportswriter as "Australia's Don Bradman of tennis". Perry raced through the first three rounds, playing particularly well against Australia's No2 Harry Hopman, before coming up against McGrath, who was only 17 but had beaten the great American Ellsworth Vines a year earlier. McGrath, one of the first exponents of the two-fisted backhand, won the first two sets before Perry's champion's instinct for survival saw him through. McGrath passed out at the end, overcome by exhaustion.

Remarkably Perry played 98 games on the day before the singles final, winning the doubles with Hughes over the full distance in addition to his long semi-final against McGrath.

He used this to have what was almost certainly a psychological dig at Crawford after dominating the final. He commented that fatigue had almost certainly affected Crawford's concentration, knowing full well that he had far more cause than the Australian to be fatigued after his marathon Friday. It was typical of Perry's tireless mental campaigning against his main rivals that he shoulduse this device to point up his ownfitness.

Two peripheral incidents, rather than the play itself, differentiated that 1934 Australian men's final. One was Perry's ploy, thought up with Jim Hines, the Slazenger sales manager, to paint his racket white, a piece of showmanship, designed to upstage Crawford, that rebounded on Perry when the paint ran and Hines sent out his "Red Indian" message.

The other involved barracking, which has always been a staple of Australian sporting events. Niggled by applause when he made a mistake, Perry turned to the crowd after Crawford netted a forehand in the final game and asked: "Why don't you applaud that one?" This caused a furore that prompted Perry to ask the umpire: "Is this a cricket or a tennis match?" A spectator then called out: "You asked for it and you got it." The uproar took a while for the umpire to quell.

It was as if Perry and the crowd both needed something to energise them after a disappointingly one-sided match.

What Murray would give for such a match in his favour today.

The Last Champion: The Life of Fred Perry, by Jon Henderson, is published this week in paperback (Yellow Jersey Press; £8.99)